Here is the full range of the sometimes maligned Kipling. No one can match his cracking yarns from the Hills (listen out for the drunken officer's dire supernatural punishment) and his message is always humane: 'But there is neither East nor West ... when two strong men come face to face.' His playful letters to his children are in poignant contrast to his later search for his dead daughter. The sting remains his epitaph on the First World War, into whose maw he offered up his only son: 'If any question why we died/ Tell them because our fathers lied.' With their variety and empathy, the readers couldn't be bettered.